With gas prices now almost double what they were on the first day of President Barack Obama’s presidency, we’re left to wonder: what ever happened to all those “price gouging” investigations Democrats launched four years ago to relieve pain at the pump?

In 2006, Rep. Nancy Pelosi promised that Democrats would enact plans to bring down the price of gas. But as this GOP ad makes clear, that didn’t happen.

Then, with the presidential election heating up in May 2007, Rep. Nancy Pelosi rolled out the tried and true “blame Bush” tactic and said that high gas prices were the result of “the Bush Administration’s failure to enact a comprehensive energy strategy.” Furthermore, Rep. Pelosi said that the Democratic Congress would “take America in a new direction” and “make up for years of inaction” by Republicans. The San Francisco Congresswoman went on to tout the actions taken by the Democratic Congress within the first 100 hours of their taking power.

The day Rep. Pelosi made those comments, the national average price for a gallon of gas was $3.07. Today, in 2012, it’s $3.39 a gallon.

Rep. Pelosi, however, was not alone in promising to right the wrongs of the “two oil men in the Oval Office.” Then-candidate Barack Obama promised that, if he were elected president, gas prices would plunge because he would impose a “windfall profits tax” on any oil producer who sold oil above $80 a barrel. But no sooner did he win the presidency than did Mr. Obama ditch the proposal altogether, even going so far as to remove mention of it from his Transition Team’s website.

Of course, anyone who was paying careful attention in 2008 to then-candidate Barack Obama should hardly be surprised that energy prices have skyrocketed on his watch. After all, during the last presidential election, Mr. Obama admitted that he was perfectly aware that his own energy policies would result in skyrocketing prices–and that he was fine with that.

Indeed, Mr. Obama flatly stated that he preferred that gas prices rise–albeit “gradually”–in order to reduce American reliance on oil.

But the Democratic sound and fury over removing our pain at the pump signified nothing. With just 10 months until the 2012 presidential election, gas prices are almost twice what they were when that oil-loving meany George Bush left office.

Why? Because oil prices hinge on basic supply and demand, not a price-fixing conspiracy by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the owner of your local gas station, as many Democrats would have voters believe. To be sure, OPEC has an enormous influence on the price of a barrel of oil. But Energy Forum Director Amy Myers Jaffe of the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University says that so-called price-gouging investigations are just a political shell game. “That’s just camouflage,” Ms. Jaffe told CNN. “That’s just ‘I want to pretend I’m doing something even, though I’m doing nothing.’”

With petroleum analysts now predicting that the price of a gallon of gas may well reach $4 a gallon by summer, Mr. Obama’s reelection hopes may rest on whether he can make manifest the promises he made four years ago to relieve America’s pain at the pump. If so, he better hurry. Summer gas prices will soon be here–and will further underscore Mr. Obama’s failure to make good on yet another campaign promise.

So with that record of Democrat demonization, let us just point out that these people deserve to get punched right in the mouth as nobody ever deserved to get punched right in the mouth.

NEW YORK - Gasoline prices have never been higher this time of the year.

At $3.53 a gallon, prices are already up 25 cents since Jan. 1. And experts say they could reach a record $4.25 a gallon by late April.

“You’re going to see a lot more staycations this year,” says Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research. “When the price gets anywhere near $4, you really see people react.”

Already, W. Howard Coudle, a retired machinist from Crestwood, Mo., has seen his monthly gasoline bill rise to $80 from about $60 in December. The closest service station is selling regular for $3.39 per gallon, the highest he’s ever seen.

“I guess we’re going to have to drive less, consolidate all our errands into one trip,” Coudle says. “It’s just oppressive.”

February follows January, of course, and according to an LA Times headline, January 2012 was similarly THE MOST EXPENSIVE JANUARY FOR GASOLINE IN AMERICAN HISTORY:

American drivers this week broke a record that will bring them no joy.

They collectively spent more than $448 billion on gasoline since the beginning of the year, according to the Oil Price Information Service, putting the previous record for gas expenditures — set in 2008 — in the rearview mirror with weeks of driving still to go.

It’s also a huge jump over last year, when U.S. drivers spent more than $100 billion less on gas.

The major reason for the record-setting gas spending in 2011 was that oil prices were consistently high all year. And that probably brought joy at the other end of the pipeline. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is on pace to top $1 trillion in net oil exports for the first time, or 29% more than last year.

Their claim was that within a few years “green technology” would work its magic and we’d have better energy-saving alternatives in no time.

Well, the ban Democrats imposed will soon go into effect. And now you can choose between a CFL light bulb laden with incredibly poisonous mercury, or an LED bulb that a) doesn’t actually produce light (which really should kind of be the whole purpose of a light bulb, shouldn’t it?) and b) are shockingly expensive.

Putting liberals in charge of the environment is as stupid as, well, putting liberals in charge of anything.

Here’s what you win for having voted for Democrats in 2006 and allowing them to take control of both the House and the Senate (in addition to the financial implosion that resulted from their policies):

With 100 watt light bulbs soon to be extinct, manufacturers are set to release an equivalent wattage of LED bulb to replace them, the Associated Press (AP) reports.

In 2007, Congress passed a law mandating that bulbs producing 100 watts worth of light meet certain efficiency goals starting in 2012. The basic design of the incandescent bulb has not changed much in the last century and wastes most of its energy as heat, especially the higher-wattage variety.

The LED bulbs will cost about $50 each and will likely go on sale next year, after the government ban takes effect.

Creating good alternatives to 100-watt bulbs has proven challenging to the lighting industry. The new bulbs have to fit into fixtures designed for older technology.

Compact fluorescents are an obvious replacement, but have flaws. Containing a small amount of toxic mercury vapor which is released if they break or are improperly thrown away, they are technically a health hazard and very few people dispose of them properly. Brighter models are bulky and may not fit in existing fixtures.

Or there’s a third option: another Republican tidal wave that will allow conservatives to overturn this brain-dead ban.

I’ve been forced to buy some of these “green” bulbs. They were advertised to last so many tens of times longer. That turned out to be just as big of a load of crap as just about every other Democrat promise I’ve heard.

What does hope and change mean entering the third year of Obama? Does it mean a) I hope I don’t starve as food prices skyrocket? Does it mean b) I hope I don’t freeze as heating oil prices skyrocket? Does it mean c) I hope I can afford the gas to drive to work as gasoline prices skyrocket? Or does it mean d) I hope I don’t go broke as the value of my dollars dwindle away.

The answer, of course, is e) all of the above.

The answer is always e when bad things are happening and you’ve got an idiot ruining the country.

WASHINGTON—Global food prices continued to climb sharply in recent months, forcing millions into poverty and potentially exacerbating already tense conditions in the Middle East, the president of the World Bank said Tuesday.

The bank’s food price index rose 15% between October of last year and January, up nearly 30% from the same period a year ago, and only 3% below the 2008 peak. The increases, which have included sharp price spikes in the cost of wheat and maize, have driven an estimated 44 million people into poverty since last June, the World Bank said.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick told reporters on a conference call that food prices are at “dangerous levels” and said there is reason to worry that it could lead to further unrest in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, where there is political unrest.

“I’m concerned that higher food prices add to stress points and could add to the fragility that is already there anytime you have revolutions and transitions,” Mr. Zoellick said, acknowledging bank officials are in close contact with interim authorities in Egypt.

The warning from the World Bank comes days before finance ministers from the Group of 20 industrialized nations are scheduled to meet in Paris to discuss a wide range of issues. Food prices, as well as inflation more broadly, is already a growing concern for international officials, but Zoellick said it needs to play a larger role in the high-level discussions this week. “The G-20 has to put food first this year,” Mr. Zoellick said, adding later that “this is a broad-based problem and it’s going to need a comprehensive solution.”

The World Bank said the rise in prices in a number of key staple crops was partially mitigated by only a modest increase in global rice prices, as well as good harvests in many African nations. Still, Mr. Zoellick warned that the World Bank remains concerned about global food-stock levels and predicted there could be increased price volatility if extreme weather conditions persist.

But don’t spend all your time worrying about starving to death; because under Obama, you have to worry about being able to afford the heating oil for your home or the gasoline to drive to work, too. Oh, yeah, and your money is now worth a heck of a lot less thanks to your community organizer’s policies:

(CBS/AP) The rapidly rising cost of crude oil has prompted a big spike in U.S. gasoline prices, with some experts saying the cost of regular gas could hit $4 a gallon.

The AAA reports that the average cost of regular gasoline in the nation was $3.14 a gallon – up 19 cents a gallon in the past two weeks, according to The New York Times. The cost of gasoline was $2.35 a gallon a year ago.

AAA spokesman Geoff Sundstrom told the Times it was possible gasoline prices could hit $4 a gallon this summer.

“We’ve gone from a worrying situation for gasoline to one that is quite alarming,” Sundstrom told the newspaper.

Driving the increase is the cost of crude oil, which hit an intraday high of $102 a barrel Wednesday as a slide in the U.S. dollar prompted investors to pump more money into energy futures as a hedge against inflation.

The dollar sank to a record low against the euro after the release of three disheartening U.S. economic reports Tuesday that show that the economy is slowing as prices for consumer goods rise. The dollar’s decline prompted investors to seek a safe haven from turmoil in the financial markets and the threat of inflation.

“Crude has cracked through the $100-level again and that’s driven by financial investors moving money into commodities markets,” said Victor Shum, an energy analyst with Purvin & Gertz in Singapore.

“The U.S. dollar weakened against the euro and the economic data also indicated that inflation in the U.S. rose in January, and commodities are generally considered a hedge against inflation,” Shum said. “We are therefore seeing these strong prices that have really little to do with oil market fundamentals.”

Light, sweet crude for April delivery spiked as high as $102.08 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange before slipping back to $101.23, up 35 cents.

The contract on Tuesday jumped $1.65 to settle at $100.88 a barrel, a record close.

In London, Brent crude added 33 cents to $99.80 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange, below the intraday record of $100.30 a barrel set earlier in the session.

The U.S. Labor Department said wholesale inflation rose by 1 percent in January on soaring oil and food costs. And Standard & Poor’s also reported that U.S. home prices fell 8.9 percent in the last three months of 2007 from a year earlier.

A report by the Conference Board, a business-backed research group, that its Consumer Confidence Index fell to the lowest since February 2003, far below what analysts had been expecting, indicated that consumers might continue to curb their spending in the coming months.
Quote : “We’ve gone from a worrying situation for gasoline to one that is quite alarming.”Geoff Sundstrom, AAA spokesman

But traders in both the energy market and the U.S. stock market, which also advanced sharply, seemed largely unfazed. Oil has risen in recent days amid an increase in speculative buying, with some traders believing that global demand will be high enough to support higher crude prices even if the American economy is slowing.

Analysts expect the U.S. Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration to report later Wednesday that the nation’s crude oil stocks rose last week by 2.4 million barrels, which would be the seventh straight week of gains.

Gasoline inventories are expected to rise by 400,000 barrels while supplies of distillates, which include heating oil and diesel, fell by 1.8 million barrels last week, according to a Dow Jones Newswires poll of analysts.

Also supporting prices were concerns about supply disruptions from unrest in Iraq, a major oil exporter. Turkish ground forces pushed their offensive against Kurdish rebels deeper into the north of Iraq, seizing seven guerrilla camps, officials said Tuesday.

But blame Bush!

Why? Because Bush built a time machine, traveled into the future, screwed up the world and then returned to 2008. So that even though Obama is well into his third year as president, he’s not actually responsible for anything.

I think of FDR and the poisonous toxic impact that fool had on our economy and our way of life. FDR prolonged the devastating human suffering of the Great Depression by seven miserable years with his ruinous policies, according to studies by economists. It would have been longer, but FDR – who was one of the worthless and weak leaders of the West who empowered Hitler to keep pushing until there was a world war – was able to get men out of the bread lines by sending them into machine gun fire. Liberalism = death back then, and liberalism = death now. The only thing that has changed is the name of the idiot in the Oval Office.

The mainstream media will continue to largely ignore what’s going on even as they blame anybody and anything but Obama for what the have to cover, because leftwing propaganda is what they do.

I hate to tell you this, but if you were stupid enough to vote for a community agitator as your president, you fully deserve to freeze to death while you starve to death. It’s called winning the Darwin award, and under Fool-inChief Obama, America has hit the Darwin Award mega-lottery jackpot.

(Reuters) – U.S. jobless claims jumped unexpectedly last week to their highest level since October, suggesting the labor market is still in a rut despite signs of improvement in the economy.

The U.S. trade deficit narrowed unexpectedly in November as exports climbed to the highest level in more than two years, government data showed on Thursday.

U.S. producer prices rose more than expected in December as energy and food costs surged while underlying inflation remained subdued, highlighting a divergence that complicates the outlook for monetary policy.

KEY POINTS: * The number of Americans filing for first-time unemployment benefits rose to 445,000 from an upwardly revised reading of 410,000 in the prior week, the Labor Department said. * It was the biggest one-week jump in about six months, confounding analyst forecasts for a small drop to 405,000. * A Labor Department official noted the rebound occurred following the holidays, which may have hindered reporting of new claims and created a backlog. * The trade gap dipped to $38.3 billion from $38.4 billion in October, the Commerce Department reported. * Analysts surveyed before the report had expected the November trade deficit to widen slightly to $40.5 billion from October’s originally reported $38.7 billion. * November’s deficit was the lowest since January 2010. * Prices at the wholesale level climbed 1.1 percent after a 0.8 percent rise in November, the Labor Department said. * Economists had been looking for a repeat of that 0.8 percent advance in December. * Inflation excluding food and energy, however, rose just 0.2 percent, in line with forecasts. That left the year-on-year gain in core producer prices at 1.3 percent, just below analyst estimates.

If you are playing a drinking game using the word “unexpectedly” please stop immediately. Because your liver will never last the final two years of the Obama presidency.

Conservatives were saying throughout the 2008 campaign that “hope and change” were never concretely defined. Well, two years into Obama, you get to see what “hope” and “change” looks like. Still liking it?

If you voted for Obama, you deserve to starve in the dark and cold. It’s those poor suckers who opposed his regime who are now suffering its effects anyway that I pity.

Democrats and mainstream media “journalists” continue to “blame Bush” for the fact that the unemployment rate increased 34.2% from when Bush left office under Obama’s watch. Their demagogic “Don’t blame us for our policies” rhetoric reminds one of the old communist Soviet Union, whose miserable agricultural performance was attributed to 72 years of bad weather.

The mainstream media has no intention whatsoever of being objective or honest when it comes to covering the results of Obama’s economic policies. When Republicans are running things, even good news is depicted as bad news, with stories about fears of what could happen, but whenever a Democrat is in charge, even the very worst news must be wrapped in some sort of positive context.

The “unexpected” is “expectedly unexpected” once you learn the constant bait-and-switch games the media plays to the Democrat White House’s fiddling tune.

But the job growth fell short of expectations based on a strengthening economy. And the drop in unemployment was partly because people stopped looking for work. […]

But other factors can affect the unemployment rate, at least temporarily. One key reason for the drop was that the government no longer counts people as unemployed when they stop looking for work.

But the only thing that mattered to most mainstream media organizations was that that way-too-close-to-10% number went down from 9.7% to 9.4%. And that favored Obama. So they went out and sang songs of rejoicing about it.

It would have been quite easy to put a Republican spin on that employment story of December: Republicans win the biggest victory since 1928, and all of a sudden the unemployment rate takes a huge drop as businesses realize that there will be somebody to stop a president and Democrat Party out to destroy businesses. But I’m not like the mainstream media: I don’t delete any of my stories, and people actually hold me responsible in comments. And I held off on pimping the good job numbers because I was pretty sure that the “good” unemployment statistic was nothing more than a temporary blip that was being pimped by liberals.

The United States under Barack Obama look like a ship of fools captained by the grand fool. The only question is whether Iran made Americans look like fools, or whether Obama made Americans look like fools.

I submit that the latter is the case. Because any fool knew what game Iran was playing. And yet Obama – out of arrogance, ignorance, and naivete – utterly failed to understand. And continues to fail to understand.

Iran’s negotiators have toughened their stance on the nuclear programme, signalling that Tehran will refuse to go ahead with an agreement to hand over 75 per cent of its enriched uranium. . .

Iran has amassed at least 1.4 tons of low-enriched uranium inside its underground plant in Natanz. If this was further enriched to weapons-grade level – a lengthy process – it would be enough for one nuclear weapon.

But Iran agreed to export 75 per cent of this stockpile to Russia and then France, where it would have been converted into fuel rods for use in a civilian research reactor in Tehran. This would have been a significant step towards containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Before talks, however, Iranian officials signalled they would renege. “Iran wants to directly buy highly-enriched uranium without sending its own low-level uranium out of the country,” reported a state television channel.

What kind of people continue to negotiate with a country that has already said it would renege on whatever deal they subsequently make? Does the word “fools” not seem in order here?

The UN’s nuclear watchdog has asked Iran to explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design, the Guardian has learned.

The very existence of the technology, known as a “two-point implosion” device, is officially secret in both the US and Britain, but according to previously unpublished documentation in a dossier compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of the design. The development was today described by nuclear experts as “breathtaking” and has added urgency to the effort to find a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis.

The outgoing head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said Thursday his probe of Iran’s nuclear program is at “a dead end” and that trust in Tehran’s credibility is shrinking after its belated revelation that it was secretly building a nuclear facility.

Mohamed ElBaradei’s blunt criticism of the Islamic Republic — four days before he leaves office — was notable in representing a broad convergence with Washington’s opinion, which for years was critical of the IAEA chief for what it perceived as his softness on Iran.

Six years of constant stonewalling all made up for by issuing one pitiful statement before leaving office. Good job, ElBaradeid, you dirtbag.

If Iran does not comply this time, you can bet a politely-worded letter will surely follow.

(CBS) Richard Grenell served as the spokesman for the last four U.S. Ambassadors to the United Nations: Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, John Danforth and John Negroponte.I certainly don’t expect the New York Times to admit that one of their greatest bogeymen turned out to be correct about Iran’s nuclear game-playing. However, the Times Editorial Board did once say “John Bolton is right. Kofi Annan is wrong.”

Unfortunately it wasn’t about the Iran nuclear issue they were talking about – it was about his opposition to the UN’s ineffective Human Rights Council.

Nevertheless, someone needs to say it now. John Bolton was right.

When the Obama Administration proclaimed victory on October 1st by announcing that a break-through had been reached in Geneva and that Iran had committed to shipping 2,600 pounds of fuel to Russia, expert Iran watchers were appropriately cynical. Bolton cautioned, yet again, that the Iranians had used some of the same diplomatic nuances they had been using for years to successfully buy more time to continue enriching uranium and fake cooperation with the international community.

Usually, the Europeans were the first to take the bait but this time the Obama Administration got hooked first. Bolton, however, was the first to stand up and call the Iranian pronouncement a sham – and he did it within hours of the announcement.

But as Obama officials were rushing to pat themselves on the back and the New York Times was proclaiming atop the paper “Iran Agrees to Send Enriched Uranium to Russia,” Iranian officials were telling reporters that they had not committed to anything. The Iranians called it “an agreement in principle” – code words for “we’d like to but…”

The Times’ reporter in Geneva, however, was taking what the Obama officials were saying and running wildly with the incredible news. Surprisingly, or maybe not, the Times had either not checked with Iranian officials or ignored their warnings in favor of the Obama Administration’s good news. Roughly a month later, the Iranian official statements confirmed the fact that the Obama Administration had been duped. The Times subsequently inched its way back to reality through multiple follow-up stories that increasingly showed skepticism in the Victory claims culminating with October 30th’s headline “Tehran Rejects Nuclear Accord.”

Today, while the Iranians reprocess more fuel, the Obama team continues to compromise and offer even more incentives to them. No wonder Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is waiting – the deal keeps getting sweeter. President Obama has offered the Iranians more time, more sites to place their illegal fuel, more personal correspondence with the Ayatollah, more excuses as to what happened to the original deal they announced and no Chinese and Russian arm-twisting. The Obama team also keeps claiming that if Iran ships 2600 pounds of fuel out to Russia for re-processing then Iran will be unable to pose a nuclear threat for at least a year.

This often told claim is a dangerous calculation based on an assumption that Iran doesn’t have more hidden fuel (we just found out about another reprocessing plant in September) and can’t quickly convert what would remain if the plan had been accepted. Additionally, the low enriched uranium in question was produced in violation of UN Security Council resolutions so any deal to help Iran convert illegal fuel undermines Security Council credibility. The naivety of President Obama could be chalked up to hope and inexperience in foreign policy matters if it wasn’t routinely and consistently happening.

Bolton should know. No American Ambassador has produced more Security Council Resolutions on the issue of Iran than John Bolton. Bolton was able to produce three UN Security Council resolutions on Iran, two with the increasing pressure of sanctions. The deadlines in the resolutions that Bolton insisted upon were kept mainly because he held his counterparts to their word.

When Iran tried to manipulate the process by asking for more time, more talks or giving empty and last minute commitments, Bolton enforced the deadlines. Bolton was incredibly patient and willing to have round the clock negotiations but in the end forced a vote of the Security Council to the dismay of the Europeans and the consternation of Russian and China. It’s true that John Bolton would not win the most popular Ambassador award at the UN but being popular shouldn’t be the priority.

I hope that the Obama team can now see that being popular at the UN doesn’t get us support from the Europeans on sanctions resolutions or an affirmative vote from Russia and China. If it did, President Obama would have passed another Security Council Resolution on Iran, North Korea and Sudan by now. Obama is so popular in foreign countries that one begins to wonder who is happier. But being popular only means you aren’t asking Countries to do anything different.

This month, the world is seeing the pressure turned down on Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions. France’s Foreign Minister has signaled their refusal to block shipments of refined fuel to Iran, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov called sanctions “counterproductive when there are talks underway” and China needs Iran’s oil so badly that it not only is refusing to consider further sanctions but is cutting new energy deals with Iran.

Where is the Obama Administration’s pressure on Iran to stop enriching uranium? Sadly, the Americans are getting hoodwinked by Iran and Europe is happy that they don’t have to vote for more sanctions or enforce the ones that are in place now. While the President gives up our missile shield to Russia, relaxes financial restrictions on Cuba, allows North Korea to violate their signed agreements and breaks campaign promises on a Sudan no-fly zone, the world applauds the most popular American President in history.

And here at home, Fareed Zakaria continues to call for more American compromises and more talk while characterizing Conservatives as unwilling to talk. It isn’t that Conservatives think speaking to Russia about Iran is bad, a claim Fareed Zakaria erroneously tries to tag Conservatives with, it’s that giving something without getting something in return is foolish and naïve. Zakaria and the other elites blinded by Obama’s global reset button want America to compromise and negotiate but fail to expect the same from the other side. Zakaria is that typical internationalist that views diplomatic success as merely sitting down to talk. Talking is the goal for them.

And if America needs to compromise in order to ensure that there are more talks, well, then so be it. Talking is success, right?

What I find almost as laughable as Obama’s never-failing ignorance and naivete is his weakness.

There’s that whole, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me” thing. How many times does Obama have to be fooled?

How did Obama get China to sign on to the meaningless IAEA censure that doesn’t offer any sort of call to actual action at all?

The Sniveller-in-Chief says that – unlike gutless ObamAmerica – Israel will actually do something if Iran continues its nuclear program. Get a load of the headline:

Two senior officials from the White House, Dennis Ross and Jeffrey Bader, made a trip to China on a “special mission” to garner support in Beijing over the Iranian nuclear program, according to a Thursday report in The Washington Post. The officials visited China two weeks before US President Barack Obama arrived in Beijing.

The officials reportedly carried the message that if China would not support the US on the issue, Israel would be likely to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. The paper quoted the officials as saying that Israel saw the issue as “an existential issue,” and that “countries that have an existential issue don’t listen to other countries.”

They stressed that were Israel to bomb Iran, the consequences for the region would be severe.

Here is Obama, leader of the free world, telling communist Iran that they’d better do what he says or big tough Israel will fight.

Just gag me.

At least Obama understands something, though. Obama himself is a gargantuan fool and a pathetic weakling, but he does at least have a clue that genuinely strong and courageous people won’t just sit idly by and allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons. And Obama thought he’d better warn China. Because that’s just the sort of stand-up guy he is [HURL!].

I have one thing to differ with Richard Grenell over: the story isn’t that John Bolton is right. The story is that Barack Obama is as wrong as he has always been.

Iran will have nuclear weapons soon. And Obama will ensure that outcome – every bit as much as Neville Chamberlain ensured that Adolf Hitler would invade Czechoslovakia followed by Poland.

As my readers know, I am a fan of economics and of history, as well as politics, a combination that forms some very interesting cycles to research, discuss and argue on. None is so interesting than the death of great nations, for here there is always the self destruction that comes before the final breakups and invasions. As they say: Rome did not fall to the barbarians, all they did was kick in the rotting gates.

It can be safely said, that the last time a great nation destroyed itself through its own hubris and economic folly was the early Soviet Union (though in the end the late Soviet Union still died by the economic hand). Now we get the opportunity to watch the Americans do the exact same thing to themselves. The most amazing thing of course, is that they are just repeating the failed mistakes of the past. One would expect their fellow travelers in suicide, the British, to have spoken up by now, but unfortunately for the British, their education system is now even more of a joke than that of the Americans.

While taking a small breather from mouthing the never ending propaganda of recovery, never mind that every real indicator is pointing to death and destruction, the American Marxists have noticed that the French and Germans are out of recession and that Russia and Italy are heading out at a good clip themselves. Of course these facts have been wrapped up into their mind boggling non stop chant of “recovery” and hope-change-zombification. What is ignored, of course, is that we and the other three great nations all cut our taxes, cut our spending, made life easy for small business…in other words: the exact opposite of the Anglo-Sphere.

That brings us to Cap and Trade. Never in the history of humanity has a more idiotic plan been put forward and sold with bigger lies. Energy is the key stone to any and every economy, be it man power, animal power, wood or coal or nuclear. How else does one power industry that makes human life better (unless of course its making the bombs that end that human life, but that’s a different topic). Never in history, with the exception of the Japanese self imposed isolation in the 1600s, did a government actively force its people away from economic activity and industry.

Even the Soviets never created such idiocy. The great famine of the late 1920s was caused by quite the opposite, as the Soviets collectivized farms to force peasants off of their land and into the big new factories. Of course this had disastrous results. So one must ask, are the powers that be in Washington and London degenerates or satanically evil? Where is the opposition? Where are the Republicans in America and Tories in England?

The unfortunate truth here is: the Republicans and Tories are the Mensheviks to the Democrat and Labour Bolsheviks. In other words, they are the slightly less radical fellow travellers who are to stupid to realize that once their usefulness is done, they will go the very camps they will help send the true opposition to. A more deserving lot was rarely born. Of course half of the useful idiots in the Bolshevik groupings will go to those very same camps.

One express idiocy of Cap and Trade in America will be the approximately additional $.19 per liter of gasoline, which is a rather very large increase in taxation, however indirectly. Of course this will not only hit the American working serfs in the pocket at fuel up, but will hit them in everything they buy and do, as America has almost no real rail to even partially off set the cost of transporting goods.

But how will this work itself out? Very simple and the chain of events has been worked out often enough.

First, the serfs will start to scream at the cost of fueling up and the cost of all their goods. The government, ever anxious not to take responsibility, will single out the petroleum factories and oil companies for gauging the people. They will make demands for them to cut prices, which of course means working for a loss. When plants start to close down or move overseas, they will be called racketeers and saboteurs. Their facilities will be nationalized so that the government can show them how to do things properly. Shortages will follow as will show trials and that’s as long as the USD holds up and foreign nations are still willing to sell oil and gasoline for other than gold, silver and other hard resources.

When food goes up, and it surely will, as the diesel the farmer uses goes up as well as his fertilizers, the government will scream that the farmers are hording, thus undermining the efforts of the enlightened. There will be confiscations of all feed crops while the farmers will get production quotas to meet or have their land nationalized again. Do not believe me? Look at the people running your governments and ask yourself: would they rather take some one’s land or admit that they screwed up and ruined everything? After a point, only the corporate farms will remain, food by oligarch, just a like the factory farms. There will be plenty of dissidents to work them.

This will of course spread from industry to industry and within a rather short order, you will be living the new fractional dream, that is a fraction of what you have now. But on the bright side, for once, your children, working for government/oligarch run joint ventures, will be able to compete adequately with the Chinese, to feed the demands of Europe and Latin America. But that will take at least a generation or two first along with a cultural revolution or two.

Unemployment is likely to rise to 13 percent or higher and will weigh on the economy for several years, countering government efforts to stabilize the banking industry, analyst Meredith Whitney told CNBC.

Senators diverted $2.6 billion in funds in a defense spending bill to pet projects largely at the expense of accounts that pay for fuel, ammunition and training for U.S. troops, including those fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to an analysis.

Among the 778 such projects, known as earmarks, packed into the bill: $25 million for a new World War II museum at the University of New Orleans and $20 million to launch an educational institute named after the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat.

While earmarks are hardly new in Washington, “in 30 years on Capitol Hill, I never saw Congress mangle the defense budget as badly as this year,” said Winslow Wheeler, a former Senate staffer who worked on defense funding and oversight for both Republicans and Democrats. He is now a senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information, an independent research organization.

Taking operational funds from our soldiers in time of war is vastly more than a “disgrace.”

Fuel? Ammunition? Bah! Let the soldiers – who are warmongers by definition – die at the hands of terrorists while trapped weaponless in their foxholes. Pork for Democrat re-election campaigns, that’s what’s really needed.

The bill is House Resolution 2454, imposing a domestic carbon emissions cap-and-trade program on the American economy.

The goal seems to be nothing short of eradicating American farms and self-sustainability.

Even DEMOCRATS are opposing the Obama Energy Bill. Climate change legislation will be utterly devastating for American farmers. Rep. Leonard Boswell (D-IA) of the House Agriculture Committee says that not only will he not vote for it, but no one else on his committee will support it either. The bill would increase the cost of everything that farmers depend on, such as diesel fuel, gasoline, fertilizers, pesticides, and a host of other things. It would raise taxes on energy by $846 billion over the next ten years. Due to the fact that farming is so energy intensive, one major study shows that it would reduce farm income by $8 billion or 28% over the next four years, by $25 billion (or by 60%) through 2024, and by $50 billion (or by 94%) by 2035 . Many are shaking their heads in amazement over the proposed impact.

Cap and trade legislation would utterly devastate the agricultural community with stratospheric operating costs, and would just as utterly destroy rural America.

To make matters even worse, the 1,000 page bill pushed through by Henry Waxman and Ed Markey has barely been examined in spite of its sweeping consequences as Democrats play cutthroat politics with America’s future.

House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-MN) is complaining that the Agriculture Department has little if any role in the climate change bill, and that the EPA is driving it. Peterson said, “A lot of us on the Committee do not want the EPA near our farms.”

Agriculture Department Secy Tom Vilsack repeatedly said, “There is obviously work yet to be done on this bill.”

Nevertheless, Nancy Pelosi is trying to rush the bill through the House, demanding that it be finished by the end of next week – leaving almost no change lawmakers could change it. And Barack Obama is pushing hard to impose his agenda before Americans have a chance to know more about it and oppose it.

The economic aspects are terrible enough:

WASHINGTON, DC, June 9 — A US House bill that would introduce a domestic carbon emissions cap-and-trade program would cost $846 billion in new taxes, the Congressional Budget Office said on June 5. [….]

American Petroleum Institute President Jack N. Gerard said on June 8 that the analysis confirmed the bill would be “massively costly.”

“The $846 billion price tag on emission allowances, borne disproportionately by oil consumers, will drive up costs of producing and refining gasoline, diesel, and other fuel products while doing nothing to protect fuel consumers, including American families, trucking, the airlines, the construction industry, and many other businesses that rely on oil to make or transport products,” Gerard said.

API: ‘A job-killer’
API said that based on allowance costs in CBO’s study, impacts could be as much as 77¢/gal for gasoline, 83¢/gal for jet fuel, and 88¢/gal for diesel fuel.

“This is what happens when market-based regulation is abandoned in favor of picking winners and losers,” Gerard said. “Putting most of the burden on one sector also helps explain why this legislation promises to be a job-killer.”

The bill was cosponsored by Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the committee’s Energy and Environment Subcommittee.

But the impact on industries such as farming will be utterly devastating:

Economists at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis are digging deeper into the effects of the Waxman-Markey climate change legislation that includes a cap and trade plan to reduce carbon dioxide by 17 percent below 2005 levels in 2020 and by 83 percent below 2005 levels in 2050. Today’s victim: Farmers. Our CDA analysts found that Waxman-Markey would adversely affect farmers in a number of ways:

• Farm income (or the amount left over after paying all expenses) is expected to drop $8 billion in 2012, $25 billion in 2024, and over $50 billion in 2035. These are decreases of 28%, 60% and 94%, respectively.
• The average net income lost over the 2010-2035 timeline is $23 billion – a 57% decrease from the baseline.
• Construction costs of farm buildings will go up by 5.5 percent in 2025 and 10 percent by 2034 (from the baseline).
• By 2035, gasoline and diesel costs are expected to be 58 percent higher and electric rates 90 percent higher.

And for the rest of us, including those of us on fixed incomes and already struggling in these tough economic times:

• The cost of producing everything from wheat to beef will increase. Indeed, the price deflator for private farm inventories goes up over 20 points by 2035. This increase gets quickly translated into much higher food prices for consumers at the grocery stores.

Most of our readers know cap and trade is an energy tax in disguise. The goal of cap and trade is to drive up energy costs so much that Americans use less. But there’s a fundamental problem with this. Just about everything we do and everything we consume uses energy, so even after consumers turn up their thermostats in the summer and down in the winter, consumers are still using a lot of energy. But under a cap and trade, they’ll be paying an exorbitantly high price for it.

Farming is no exception; in fact, farming is very energy-intensive, with fuel, chemical, electricity and fertilizer costs. They have to purchase a lot of equipment and have to construct a lot of buildings. The Heritage Foundation’s CDA estimates that the price of constructing farm buildings will go up by 4.5 percent in 2024 and by over 10 percent in 2034 (from the baseline) solely because of the upward pressure cap and trade puts on energy prices.

The price of tractors– and every other piece of farm equipment you can think of– will increase as well.

Worst of all is what happens to farmers’ net income. Farmers live off their gross income; what they earn in addition to that is their net income or marginal income. Waxman-Markey significantly shrinks farmers’ net income pie. Farm income is expected to drop $8 billion in 2012, $25 billion in 2024, and over $50 billion in 2035. These are decreases of 28%, 60% and 94% from the baseline, respectively.

Waxman-Markey increases the costs of farm inventories, which in turn raises the cost of food sold to the consumer. At first glance, this may appear to be a good thing for farmers. Higher prices equals higher profit. But this would only be true if all other things were equal. That’s certainly not the case here. Higher energy prices hurt the overall economy, which means less demand for all goods, less production, higher unemployment, and reduced income. This overall economic slowdown reduces demand for agricultural goods, too. And, as we’ve seen above from the charts, a lot changes for farmers; particularly, their overall cost of operations rise and their net incomes fall.

Waxman-Markey’s effect on farmers should raise a red flag for those in the farm belt and will put U.S. agriculture at a tremendous competitive disadvantage if enacted. Consumers will feel the pain as well, not only from the increase in their own energy prices, but increased food prices. And for what? A change in the temperature too small to notice.

“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said.

“That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen,” he added.

And now we see what Obama’s “leadership” looks like: it looks like a bigger version of North Korea. Nationalizing the auto industry and imposing tiny little clown cars on the country; an energy policy that will tax us into freezing in the dark at night (or conversely sweltering in the summer heat); and of course the whole famine thing.

You can’t say he didn’t warn us, I suppose.

Revelation 6:5-6 “When he opened the third seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” And I looked, and behold, a black horse! And its rider had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard what seemed to be a voice in the midst of the four living creatures, saying, “A quart of wheat for a day’s wage, and three quarts of barley for a day’s wage, and do not harm the oil and wine.”

The beast is coming. That approaching reality is becoming clearer every single day.

The People’s Republic of California – which voted for Barack Obama over John McCain by a margin of 24 points – did something else that should send an even louder message: the “green,” “global warming,” “alternative energy” initiatives got utterly annihilated. Proposition 7 – which would have required utilities to generate 40 percent of their power from renewable energy by 2020 and 50 percent by 2025 – went down 65% to 35%. And Proposition 10 – which would have created $5 billion in general obligation bonds to help consumers and others purchase certain high fuel economy or alternative fuel vehicles, and to fund research into alternative fuel technology – went down 60% to 40%.

Sheppard asks, “Will global warming-obsessed media share this news with the citizenry? Shouldn’t this be HUGE news given President-elect Obama’s green sympathies and his desire to enact a carbon cap and trade scheme to reduce carbon dioxide emissions?” Not when the media is thoroughly corrupt, and proponents of anthropogenic global warming are demagogues.

I’ve written about the fraud that is known as “anthropogenic global warming”:

According to official data, in every year since 1998 world temperatures have been getting colder, and in 2002 Arctic ice actually increased. Why, then, do we not hear about that?

And one thing is certain: the Democrats you elected to run your lives certainly aren’t going to raise it, either.

Californians rejected both measures because they came to realize that they would have cost an already overstressed economy $15 billion dollars. Are Californians liberal? Big time. Democrats are now in nearly total control of the state. Are Californians socialist nuts? Oh, yeah. As one example among many, Californians in Berkeley passed two resolutions calling the Marines “uninvited and unwelcome intruders in the city.” Are they suicidal loons who will go right off the cliff with their ideology? Incredibly, as it turns out, not quite yet.

But what you don’t realize, America, is that you are going to have an alternative energy boondoggle that makes both California propositions look like a drop in the bucket forced onto your economy. There isn’t a federal proposition system such that voters get to decide whether polar bears should be considered more important than your kids. You already voted for it, whether you knew it or not.

“The one thing we fail to talk about is those costs that you don’t see on the bottom line. That is coal makes us sick, oil makes us sick; it’s global warming. It’s ruining our country, it’s ruining our world. We’ve got to stop using fossil fuel.”

And – like it or not, ready or not – you WILL stop using fossil fuels. The fact that there is nothing to replace them with is irrelevant (did you know that 90% of our energy comes from fossil fuels? Did you know that alternative energy sources can’t even begin to replace fossil fuels?).

You voted to give House Speaker Nancy PelosiTOTAL domination in the House of Representatives. In her frankly unhinged spiel on global warming, she ranted:

“I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet,” she says impatiently when questioned. “I will not have this debate trivialized by their excuse for their failed policy.”

Democrats finally blinked on oil drilling after decades of obstruction. They did so only after it was long past obvious that Americans overwhelmingly wanted them to harness our domestic oil supply. But now that they have total power, and the price of oil has gone back down due to the coming recession, you can count on them to go back on whatever they said they would do.

The problem is, uh, can you get the American people to say, “This is really important,” and force their representatives to do the right thing? That requires mobilizing a citizenry. That requires them understanding what is at stake. Uh, and climate change is a great example.You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, uh, you know — Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.

Get ready, America: you voted to have your economy destroyed by foolish ideological agendas, and you are going to get it.

The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal, but we’re going to abandon it. No matter how much it costs us; no matter how harmful it is going to be on our economy; no matter how hard it is for millions of American families. And we’re not going to drill for domestic oil, no matter how much it would help. The people we elected don’t want oil. They think it’s icky. Same with nuclear energy. They might occasionally talk about “being willing to consider” these energy sources. But they aren’t; and you can know that because they never have been.